How Many Hits Does Your Website Get Per Day?

Dinner Party Statistics

I was at a friend’s house the other night and a guy there was telling us about the number of hits he gets each day on his web site. He said, “I get hundreds of hits every day”. His website sounded like a huge success.

Hit Counters

You know those web hit counters that you used to see on practically every web site in the 1990s, but now you only see them on sites that look as if they were written in the 1990s? Look – I’ve put one here on this blog post.


If you refresh the page, the hit counter will add one to the total with each hit of the refresh button. That should tell you that this hit counter and others like it are pretty useless.

The owner of a site with a hit counter on it can make the hit counter’s value increase just by refreshing the page a few hundred times each day, (or by using a program to do it automatically). He can even set the hit counter to start at a certain number rather then zero. For example, I started the hit counter above at 55,000 to make the casual observer think that over 55,000 people have visited this page.

What’s The Difference Between Page Views, Hits and Unique Visitors

This is all obvious if you know it, but it is surprising how any people don’t. Ask people you think should know the difference – this is a good question to ask a web designer you are considering hiring. If they get it wrong, I suggest you find another one.

Unique Visitors

A visitor, or rather a unique visitor is defined as a single person who visits your web site in a single session. So, if you visit a site and you spend say 15 minutes browsing various pages on it – say you visit a total of 25 different pages in that time, that would count as a single visit.

Page Views

The page view count is the actual number of pages that are made in the timeframe. So if you have 400 page views say, on a single day, that would mean that all your visitors together, viewed pages a total of 400 times. In the example we used earlier we would say that the single visitor who visited 25 pages, would have contributed at least 25 page views. This is because I said he visited 25 different pages, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t visit some of them more than once. In other words he may have contributed maybe 30 or 40 page views.

And Finally, Hits . . .

So what are these famous hits? Hits are not really of any use to you. But I’ll tell you what they are. Imagine there is a webpage called dogs.html, and on that page is some text and 10 images of dogs. Let’s also say that dogs.html uses a separate CSS file called dogs.css. If you go and view that page, you will incur 12 hits just by viewing that page once. That is because dogs.html counts as one hit, the 10 images count as a further 10 hits and the CSS file counts as one hit, giving a total of 12 hits. Now say you refresh the page. You will incur another 12 hits. You will add 12 hits to the hit count every time you hit refresh.

If 5 people visit the page once, that would make 60 hits. Can you see how hits have no meaningful relationship to unique visitor numbers? Now imagine the page dogs.html had 100 thumbnail images on it. This would mean that every time the page was viewed it would cause 102 hits to be added to the hit count. No wonder the guy at the dinner party thought he was getting a lot of visitors because he had a lot of hits. It is likely he thought hits were visitors.

. . . And Back to Hit Counters

The Hit Counter above does not count ‘hits’ as defined here. It counts pageviews for the page on which it is located – in this case, this page. So Hit counters like the one shown above should really be called Page View counters.

Robots And Visitors

There are some other things to consider whilst on this subject, but I’ll leave that for another day.

Suffice to say your stats package needs to be a bit more sophisticated than that hit counter up top here. Also, ask yourself ‘what constitutes a visit‘. Stats packages may decide that a break of 10 or 20 minutes in your viewing of a web site constitutes two visits. And also note that some stats packages can mix up robot visits with human visits so all those hits you are getting could be due to a single robot with a crush on your site.

Outsourcing Article Writing – You Get What You Pay For

Buying in Articles

I recently found myself overwhelmed by the amount of work I had to do, so decided to look around the web for article writing services. I have always resisted this because of the two following reasons,

  1. the more reasonably priced article writing services are based overseas in countries where the first language is not English and therefore I cannot expect the articles to sound exactly as if written by someone whose first language is English
  2. Even if the English were perfect, what is the point of articles that use all the correct keywords, but are not of a high enough quality to provide useful information for the reader ?

However, time and time again I heard it was possible to get good quality articles written.

I looked around and found Mosaic Services (please note, before you jump off to check them out, this article is not a recommendation). Mosaic Services had a site with a plethora of badges, Microsoft endorsements and the like. But had I had time to actually read the site properly, I would have noticed the articles on it were very poor.

I completed an enquiry form and received a sales response from a chap called Mayank Gupta. Mosaic say they are based in New York and in India. I didn’t feel convinced by his sales pitch, and didn’t take up his offer to start an article writing project. But Mayank Gupta proved to be very persistent and called me on the phone repeatedly.

Eventually, worn down by a large number of phone calls and his polite insistence as to the quality of the work Mosaic did, I agreed to have his company write some articles based on his offer of a full refund if I didn’t like them.

Mayank Gupta of Mosaic Services said I should pay pay $600 for 50 articles, by way of $300 up front and $300 on full delivery. I paid $300. Some weeks later, 20 articles arrived. I had been away and when I got back with a pile of work on my desk, I left it a couple of days before I read them.

When I did sit down to read them, they were so poorly written, and contained such low quality and sometimes frankly ludicrous information that it was clear there was no way I could put my name or my client’s name to them. I couldn’t even see how I might re-write them as when you fixed the poor English, it left you with just a bunch of nonsensical premises.

This is where I made my second mistake – I didn’t say anything to Mayank Gupta about this. Because it was now beginning to look like he’d have said anything to get me to part with some cash, why would he keep his word on a refund? I was angry with myself and being busy decided to shelve it and put it down to experience.

A couple of weeks later the second 20 articles arrived. I half hoped they would somehow be better. But they were of the same low quality as the first 20 articles.

So, annoyed now (finally), I emailed Mayank and told him the articles were unusable and after much argument they offered me a $60 refund, which was then was increased to $180 after some more discussion. Fortunately I had only paid $300 of the total $600, but I wanted the full $300 refunded. However he wouldn’t do it. (The point here is that just getting them to agree to refund $180 was extremely time consuming and given that I wanted the articles in the first place to save time, the refund alone wasn’t the only issue.)

His argument was – rightly, I have to say – that if I was unhappy I should have said so after the first 20 articles. I actually wonder if it would have made any difference. My argument was that the work was unfit for purpose. They offered to improve them – but I refused. If they were capable of of better work why didn’t I get it in the first place?

But here is the thing. Mayank offered to improve some articles that were apparently written for me that were clearly written for someone else – how do I know? Some of articles were promoting other companies. They were full of recommendations that the reader should do business with companies that I had never heard of. Do business with these people at your peril.

I Now Own These Articles

Because I did not get a full refund, I am in the unfortunate position of owning some useless articles. What should I do with them?

I am placing one here for you to read at your leisure. If you think, having read it, that Mosaic is the right company for you, and that you’d like a call from Mayank Gupta then you know where to contact him.

If you want some free articles (I’ve already paid for them and if my suspicions are correct, so have a number of other people), here is a typical sample below. You are welcome to the rest if you wish – just drop me an email.

By the way – tropical fruit does not grow in the UK at the beach, we don’t have too many tidal waves, there is not a gentle sea breeze all year around, foreign tourists do not ‘throng’ our beaches all year around, (not unless they don’t mind freezing to death) and most of our seafood delicacies end up in France. But that’s another story. Anyway – enjoy.

Increasing popularity of cheap beach front property in UK

(an article by Mosaic Services)

When people purchase their dream home, they want to ensure that the ambience or surrounding of their house is the best they can afford. Many people after spending a significant portion of their life in congested cities want to purchase a property far from the madding crowd. In other words, they look for homes situated in a naturally beautiful environment. That is why beachfront properties are much sought after these days. However, everything that is of premium quality comes at a premium cost too. Since such properties are quite expensive, people often look for affordable solutions without compromising on the visual quotient. For this reason, investors dealing with real estate consider beachfront properties as prime deals.

The availability of cheap beachfront houses in the UK has attracted a lot of people as well as estate investors in recent times. The calm blue skies over head, the gentle breeze all through year and the serene beauty of these beaches has made them extraordinary. A sea view residence in the UK has many benefits. For people who enjoy seafood, the wide variety of marine food and other delicacies prove to be a big temptation. Besides, it offers people a wide panoramic view of the landscape. The prices are really competitive compared to other beachfront properties. In addition, tropical fruits and crops grow easily in the soil as they are not very close to the beach itself. For families having a house in the metropolis, a beachfront house can serve very well as an occasional holiday resort.

Investors have woken up to this prospect and it is high time for anyone dealing in the trade to opt for beach front property deals. It is however advisable to opt for seaside residences a little far from the beaches. This is because seaside properties are prone to occasional natural hazards like cyclones, storms and tidal waves. Many clever homeowners having a property by the beaches earn profits by leasing it to tourists. Since a huge number of tourists from several nations throng the UK beaches all year round, one can laugh all the way to the bank. In this way many homeowners can recover the money they spent in buying a beach side property in a short span of time.

It is probable that due to its many advantages, beach font properties have helped in the rise of the popularity of cheap beachfront properties in the UK. For anyone wishing to buy a house in a serene location or an investor looking for good investment options, these sea beach houses are the ultimate for investment. They offer the unbeatable combination of enjoying nature at its best and enjoying huge amounts of money, simultaneously.

In most cases, however, their cost is much higher than normal houses. As a consequence, whenever there is news of a beach front property that is available at a lesser price, people are keen to acquire it.

Imagine if you read this on any property website – you’d assume the website owner was insane, and you’d leave.

First Steps With Alexa Ranking and Google Page Rank

The popularity of your blog or web site will be of great interest to you and no doubt you will be monitoring your site via a statistics package of some description. If you make sales on your site, you will know if you’re doing well or need to improve by how many sales you make. To gauge yours and competitor site’s popularity, it is useful to use and understand a couple of tools that are freely available.

The two main ways of doing this are to regularly check both your Alexa Rating and Your Google Page Rank and to be aware of those of your competitors.

Use Firefox as Your Browser of Choice

It makes it a bit easier to check these measurements if you install the appropriate tools bars on your browser so that the values of each, show up for every web site you visit. And it just makes life a bit easier if you use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer, if this is at all possible.

Get FirefoxIf you want to check your web site out in the first instance, this is the place to start. The reasons to start browsing with Firefox are,

  • It is less forgiving than Internet Explorer and so any errors will show up more readily. This means you can fix them because you’ll know they are there.
  • Lots of tools are available for Firefox and you can therefore customise it to suit your needs

I’ll only talk about Alexa Ratings and Google Page Rank now in relation to the Firefox browser for ease.

Set Up The Toolbar with Search Status Tools

Install the http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus addon into Firefox so that you can automatically read off the Alexa Rating and Google Page Rank values for each site you visit whilst using the Firefox browser.

Once you have done that you’ll see the Alexa Rating and Google Page Rank of any site you visit in the status bar at the bottom of your browser window. See picture below where the red arrows show the Alexa Rating of the site and the Google Page Rank of the page, you are currently on.

The display is a graphical one, but you can run your cursor over the little graphic images and the actual values will display, or you can right-click the graphic and set it to display text (numbers), rather than the little graphs.

Now browse the internet checking on the popularity of each page or site, according to what the toolbar indicates.

Alexa Rating

Alexa is not an accurate tool and much has already been written about this. For the purposes of this post we’ll assume we understand its limitations. For now let’s suspend our disbelief, and assume that Alexa does measure real site popularity (practically as I have indicated, it doesn’t, but that is the topic of another discussion). So, based on this assumption, a site with an Alexa rating of 2,600,000 is less popular than a site with a rating of 60,000. In other words, the smaller the number the more popular the site.

The Alexa rating applies to a whole site and will usually fall somewhere between 1 and several millions. A site with an Alexa Rating of 163,000 for example, means that Alexa believes this site (over the previous 3 months), to be the 163,000th most popular site on the internet. I.e there are only 162,999 sites that are more popular.

Google Page Rank

Google Page Rank measures the importance of a single page on the internet according to Google’s proprietary ranking algorithm. How they calculate this is not altogether known, but it has to do with how many other pages on the internet link back to pages on your site, the Google Page rank of the those incoming links, and other unspecified criteria. Google explains here. However, the PR or Page Rank of a page is better the higher it is, (the opposite to Alexa ranking).

The Google Page Rank will usually fall somewhere between unspecified (i.e. no Page Rank whatsover), through to zero all the way up to 10 and applies to a single page. (I.e a single site may comprise many pages and each will have its own page rank).

Usually then, a page with a PR of 0 on a site with an Alexa Rating of 1,000,000+ should mean that the site is not visited very often and is not rated by other sites. In other words it is not doing very well.

Alternatively a page with PR 6 and an Alexa rating of say 80,000, is doing pretty well in terms of visits and Google kudos.

A site with an Alexa Rating of say 6 and a Google Page Rank of 8, can be said to be resident in internet heaven. (As of today for example, myspace.com has those ratings)

Paula’s Question

My friend Paula asked on a previous post comment,

when I look at some sites/blogs they seem to have excellent alexa rankings but no page ranking – why?

I asked Paula to give me examples of sites she had seen that fitted this description. Here are a representative sample of the links she gave me with rankings at the time of writing:

http://watertrough.blogspot.com
  • PR=4 AR=9.9m+ (quite good page rank, very poor alexa rating)
  • This has a decent Page Rank and a poor Alexa rating.
  • A page rank of 4 suggests that the home page of the site has a fair number of links coming into it, with moderately good PRs of their own.
  • The Alexa Rank means two things : hardly a soul with the Alexa Toolbar installed is visiting the site, and the owner of the site probably doesn’t have it installed either.
  • There are 1,172 incoming links (from other sites) to this url. That’s a good number of incoming links, but in the case of many blogs, most incoming links are down to the effort of the authors who leave comments on other people’s blogs and thus essentially create most incoming links for themselves. (Not quite the same as thousands of other sites voluntarily linking to you). However, this would support the fairly good PR the page has.
  • Because the Alexa rating is so poor, we can assume it is the Alexa rating of the actual blog, rather than that of the main domain, blogspot.com (or blogger.com).
  • Either very few visitors who use this blog know and/or care about the Alexa toolbar or the blog has few visitors. I suggest it is the former as the commenting efforts put in by the author are being rewarded by a fairly good Page Rank which means the visits to the blog are probably at the very least, reciprocated by the people who own the blogs that this blog owner comments on.
  • See the evidence that Alexa is rating the blog itself rather than than the main domain below. But also note that the value of 80,298 sites linking is not true as this statistic pertains to blogger.com (blogspot) not the individual blog.

http://welshhillsagain.blogspot.com
  • PR=1 AR=12. (poor page rank and outstanding alexa rating)
  • This has a poor Page Rank and an outstanding Alexa Ranking (suggesting there are only 11 other sites more popular than this one). These two results seem at odds. The reason is that Alexa have not managed (I don’t know why exactly) to provide true rankings for all individual blogs at this point in time. So for the blog in the previous example above, the Alexa rating was the true one for the actual blog site, but in this case, the Alexa rating is that of the parent domain blogspot.com, which of course is why it is extremely good. You can verify this by looking each url up in Alexa itself and you will see that they are in this case counting the rating of blogspot.com but in the previous case, looking only at the subdomain at watertrough.blogspot.com. Hence the disparity. By the way, you right-click on the little Alexa graph an select show overview to see this for yourself (see image below).
  • The poor PR is understood when you examine the number of incoming links. There are only 36 to this home page. This probably means this blog author does not realise the important of generating links for him/herself by leaving hundreds of comments all over other people’s blogs, (unlike the author of the previous blog).

Paula – I hope that answers your question. If it does not, I am about to write this up again on a different blog aimed at explaining things in a better way.

How to Set the Default Language Dictionary on Microsoft Word 2007

Need to know more about WORD? Try a comprehensive WORD 2007 course – covers all other Microsoft Office products too!

Default Dictionary for Microsoft Word 2003

If you are having problems with the default dictionary setting for Word 2003, please read about how to set the default dictionary on Microsoft Word 2003.

Default Dictionary for Microsoft Word 2007

To achieve this, follow these instructions.

1. Click on start, then on all programs, then on Microsoft Office, then on Microsoft Office Tools, then on Microsoft Office 2007 Language Settings – see picture below.

Word Language Settings

2. When you have done that, you will see another window shown below :

Word 2007 Language Settings

Then ensure that the enabled editing languages you need are in the Enabled Editing Languages box on the right hand side and that the default the Primary Editing Language is set in the box at the bottom of the window as shown above. This will be the default dictionary.

If that doesn’t work – there are scores of suggestions below in the comments to this blog post. Thanks to everyone who has contributed. I can’t believe how many people continue to have problems with Word. Maybe the latest version is better?

How To Find GLatLng (longitude and latitude) for any Location in Europe

Or how to find Google Maps API GLatLng (longitude and latitude) parameters for anywhere in Europe easily. If you want an easy way to find co-ordinates manually – here it is.

I use Michelin which is a superb route finding service as anyone who has used it to drive around in Europe will know, and their website covers most of Europe so there shouldn’t be many places we can’t find using it. I have used it for finding longitudes and latitudes in France, Spain, the UK and Italy for example.

Google Maps has an API interface, and you can call GLatLng with the appropriate parameters to map any chosen location like this :

var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map"));
map.setCenter(new GLatLng(37.4419, -122.1419), 13);

The example above gives the longitude and latitude for a location in California – it is the example on the Google API help pages.

An Example – Find the GLatLng coordinates for a town in France

OK – so say you want to find an accurate longitude and latitude for the ski resort town of Avoriaz. The french postcode for Avoriaz is 74110. This is how I do it.

  1. Go to viamichelin
  2. Click on the maps link on the horizontal menu near the top of the page
  3. In the box on the left hand side, select the country of France
  4. Type 74110 Avoriaz into the postcode, city, area field
  5. Click on the yellow search button and you get a detailed map of the area, with Avoriaz in the centre,
    marked with a symbol suggesting this is the exact point we were searching for.
  6. There is also a white bubble that appears on the map containing more options
  7. In this bubble, click on the link that says send this address to GPS.
  8. When the send to GPS pop up appears, provide a file name (with no spaces) then click on Send.
  9. When prompted, open the file with notepad
  10. You will have a file (in this case) called avoriaz.xvm
  11. The file contains a string with the precise longitude and latitude values, in this case : longitude=”6.78365″ latitude=”46.19011″
  12. Et voila!